Month: June 2010

For those that haven’t noticed in the comments, one of our own is getting married! I’ll deliberately leave her name out of it for the moment in case she doesn’t want to be the center of attention, but if you’ve been paying attention you’ll notice that one of our regular contributors has spoken of her wedding plans in recent weeks.

Even better? I threw out the idea recently of performing Pyramus and Thisbe during the wedding reception…and she tells me she convinced her groom to go for it! I still don’t know if she’s kidding, that is just too awesome to be true.

Now we have a favor (ahem) to ask about … favors.  I want to be in this wedding, because she wants to give out Shakespeare favors.  How cool is that?

Idea #1 is Mini Leather-bound Shakespeare. 

Need more ideas.  What makes a good “Shakespeare wedding favor”?  I swear this has nothing to do with my Shakespeare wedding book, although I will almost certainly add a section on favors now that it’s come up. 🙂

Thanks to Facebook friend David for this pointer to a show that’s right down the street from me (if you count 2 hour drives as right down the street), not sure if I’ll be able to make it:

Plimoth Plantation invites you to a lively, hour-long live performance of snippets of Shakesperean songs and scenes. Shakespeare in a Song is a unique production combining the words of Shakespeare set to modern and traditional tunes, interspersed with performance excerpts from some of the Bard’s most popular plays. The Unicorn Singers, an 18 person-chamber chorus, will be joining The Plimoth Plantation Players (a 6 man Shakespeare production company) for this unique performance of historic words coupled with contemporary music.

http://www.plimoth.org/calendar/index.php?ev=2455360&mo=6&yr=2010

I wish I could say that this Angelina Jolie to play Cleopatra story is about the Shakespeare play Antony and Cleopatra, but alas it is not. The movie is based on an upcoming biography of the Queen of the Nile.

Still, though, nice to imagine.  Although I don’t think I’m ready for her to play Cleopatra, I’d like to pretend she can still get away with Helena/Hermia in Dream, maybe. Or she’d make a killer Shrew. Work her way up to Lady M.

If we got Angelina doing Shakespeare, what role would you give Brad Pitt?

Following up on yesterday’s discussion about using Shakespeare to teach foreign languages, I spotted a pattern that gave me an idea.  “To be or not to be” is fascinating on a number of levels – in this case it is a very simple string of very simple words, repeated, that also happen to represent several core language concepts — “be”, “to be” (infinitive), “or” (conjunction), “not” (negation).

So with that in mind and some help from NiceTranslator.com  I typed that sentence (using “To be or not to be, that is the question” in case there were grammatical considerations in some languages) and asked it for a translation into some 50 different languages.  I’m not sure how well this is going to handle all the special characters, but we’ll worry about that later. Right now I’m fascinated by the languages that fit a sort of “B O N B” pattern, where B is their word for “to be”, O for “or”, “N” for not.  

I imagined something like a Shakespearean Rosetta stone, where you knew that the language in front of you, that’d you never seen before, represented Hamlet.  How much of that language’s rules, vocabulary and grammar might you be able to discern?

The similarities, rather than the differences, are most fascinating.  Consider Dutch:  Zijn of niet zijn, dat is de vraag. Fits my “B O N B” pattern quite nicely.  Now consider Turkish : Olmak ya da olmamak, bu soru için.  With a slight change to the second instance of B (olmak -> olmamak), it still fits.  But would you have ever imagined similarities in language between Dutch and Turkish? Or Czech: Být či nebýt, to je otázka, where the negation is written as a single word, Být becoming nebýt.

I’ve included the entire list here for reference. What other interesting similarities leap out at you? Which languages are clearly evolved from the same roots?

Disclaimer : I’m aware that these probably go under the heading of “literal translation” and thus are more subject to matching the pattern in the original source, than if you were to ask a native speaker to translate it more freely.  Understood.  But there are still plenty of languages on this list that don’t fit the pattern, so clearly there’s some level of reasoning that goes into the translation.

Here’s something you don’t see every day.  The G4 cable network, which is essentially dedicated to videogames, has a show called “Attack of the Show”.  I’m not fully sure why this happened, but this week they did a skit where the two hosts, Kevin and Jessica, performed a scene from King Lear. The description says that “an unfortunate broadcast glitch showed a random lecture on Shakespeare’s King Lear instead of the normal opening.” I think I would have liked to see the random lecture. 😉